Bob Lefsetz posted a pithy commentary on ebooks and digital publishing last week, and as usual he’s not wrong.

But his view of the ebook market is incomplete:

They’re killing the book business.

The old guard, the ones married to paper and indie bookstores, the publishers afraid of big bad Amazon, have achieved their goal, they’ve killed the e-book. That’s right, e-book sales are down by 21.8%, the entire book business has declined by 2.7%, this is what happens when Luddites living in the past refuse to enter the future. This is what would be happening in music if the insane artists screaming about streaming were able to get their way.

Alas, music is far ahead of the book business, with everything available for one low price, with streaming burgeoning, sales are up by 8.1%.

…

E-books used to be under ten bucks. Now, in some cases, they cost more than the physical iteration. That makes no sense, with no printing and shipping. The book business is making the same mistake the record business once did. Believing it was entitled to profits. That it was all right to sell an overpriced CD with one good cut, that the public didn’t mind, but that proved untrue.

But at least people wanted to steal music. They don’t seem to want to steal books, they just want to ignore them, that’s the real disaster, how the book business has marginalized itself.

…

So the book business defeated the techies. The supposed rapists and pillagers who cared not a whit about the value of content. They brought Jeff Bezos to his knees.

But Bezos doesn’t really care, because books are a de minimis part of Amazon’s overall market.

The supposedly smart people, standing up for the lowly artist, did a disservice to everybody involved. E-books were the future, priced to reflect the advancement of digital distribution. But they couldn’t survive, because the writers and publishers were afraid of change. …

He’s mostly right, but Lefsetz still missed a few nuances, and that has lead him to the wrong conclusion.

For one thing, he falls in the classic trap of misinterpreting AAP and other trade group revenue stats as representing the entire book publishing industry rather than just the legacy industry.

He’s not the first to make that mistake, and it really doesn’t matter here because it doesn’t change his broader point – that the legacy industry is killing itself by fighting against the future, against what consumers want.

Readers want to get their content in a form which is quick, cheap, and easy to access. Thanks to the legacy book publishing industry’s insistence on DRM, and on high prices, their ebooks only meet one of the three criteria.

eBooks are quick, but traditionally published titles are not cheap or easy to access, and that is driving consumers to alternatives.

And this is where Lefsetz is most wrong. He thinks that people "don’t seem to want to steal books, they just want to ignore them, that’s the real disaster, how the book business has marginalized itself".

I don’t think that’s the case.

Instead, high ebook prices are driving people to buy used books, and to visit their libraries and borrow (paper) books.

Edit: And as Felix points out in the comments, consumers are also shifting their buying habits to lower-priced indie ebooks.

They are ending up at their public library’s website, where they get on a waitlist for a book which costs $14 in the Kindle Store.

Or they’re going on Amazon, finding a 20-year-old title selling for $15, and then flipping to the used category to buy an old copy for $4 or $5. (It is that easy, yes.)

And that last point is the real tragedy of high ebook prices: the legacy book publishing industry missed their chance to kill the used book market.

When ebooks are quick, cheap, and easy to access, consumers will choose them over a paper book. If consumers had the option they would prefer immediate delivery of a cheap ebook over waiting for a paper book to be mailed to them.

Many in the legacy industry fear what that would do to new print sales, but if the prices were low enough then the same preference would also affect the used book market.

The thing about the used book market is that Amazon has effectively set the floor price for online sales ($4), and thanks to the way the internet lets sellers congregate on marketplace sites market pressure drives the price down whenever supply exceeds demand.

Imagine what would happen of the Big Five priced their 5- and 10-year-old backlist ebook titles at $5 to $7 instead of $12 to $15. Consumers would compare a $7 ebook (which they could get in a second) with a $5 used book, and they would buy the ebook.

That would cannibalize the used book market, shifting sales to the ebook market and boosting publisher revenue at the expense of used book retailers.

And that is the really crazy part about high ebook prices. Not only do high prices go against consumer demand, but they also foreclose the possibility of killing off the one thing publishers should hate more than ebooks.

image by Texas State Library and Archives Commission

The intern who has been left in charge of B&N’s ebook platform (after many functions were outsourced) added a new feature this week.

A reader has tipped me to the news that ebooks uploaded through Nook Press can now be given away for free. All a publisher has to do is set the price to zero and then update their listing. That update could take anywhere from minutes to days to go like on the B&N website, but once it is the ebook will be free.

B&N broke the news this week in an email to publishers, which you will find at the end of this post.

Given that the Nook Store now accounts for only a tiny fraction of ebook sales, this won’t prove very useful, but it is still a feature which Amazon does not offer.

Thanks, Karen, for the tip!

O O O

Dear Publisher,

Free eBooks have arrived at NOOK Press! Now, publishers have the opportunity to set the price of any NOOK Press eBook to FREE. We understand the importance of this feature and are excited to provide our publishers with this great promotional tool.

To set an eBook to FREE, simply log in to the NOOK Press eBook platform and choose any project. Once selected, you can change the list price to $0.00 and click save. The price update can take a few minutes or up to 72 hours, after which your eBook will be available to customers at BN.com free of charge.

For those of you who currently have FREE eBooks with other vendors, you can migrate these eBooks to NOOK Press without losing your Customer Reviews. As long as the title, author name, and series name is the exact same on your new NOOK Press title, all Customer Reviews will transfer automatically. You can then ask the other vendor to unlist / unpublish their edition of your eBook.

The number of FREE downloads your title receives will be reflected in your sales dashboard under the Recent Sales section.

We thank you so much for your continued support and enthusiasm.

Happy publishing!
The NOOK Press Team

image by MikeKalasnik

Bexar County Public Library got a lot of press coverage several years ago when it opened its book-less Bibliotech library branch, and now it is taking the show on the road.

The local ABC station and the Rivard Report reported yesterday that VIA Metropolitan Transit, the local buss company, is installing six Bibliotech kiosks in bus stations around San Antonio.

Bexar County and VIA are making it easier than ever to take part in their "Ride & Read" initiative.

There are plenty of advantage to taking public transportation so why not use the time to get into a good book? That’s the message VIA is sending out to its riders in their latest attempt to connect the community.

They’re partnering with Bexar County and their Bibliotech program.

"You don’t have to be the driver and pay attention to the traffic, so a great use of your time is to sit back and read and catch up on things," said Jeffrey Arndt, president and CEO of VIA Metropolitan Transit.

You can see a kiosk in the lead photo, which was taken by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone.

The kiosks are located at VIA’s Downtown Information Center, Centro Plaza, Ellis Alley Transit Center, North Star Transit Center, Medical Center Transit Center, and Crossroads Park & Ride.

Anyone who has a Wifi-equipped mobile device can sign up  for a library account and check out ebooks. They will have to provide their name and address but no documentation required.

"We have an e-book collection of e-books and e-audio books of over 37,000 through our cloud library.  However, on our website through our other providers, we have over 100,000 books available to the reader," said Bibliotech administrator Laura Cole.

Remember back in March when B&N got out of the UK ebook market and surprised us all by handing its customers to Sainsbury’s rather than Kobo?

It turns out that B&N could have saved everyone the aggravation, because Sainsbury’s just got out of ebooks and handed its customers to Kobo.

Kobo posted the news on their blog:

Rakuten Kobo, a global digital reading company created by booklovers for booklovers, is working with Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand (part of Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s leading food and non-food retailers), to offer Sainsbury’s customers the opportunity to transfer their eBook libraries to Kobo’s eReading service as Sainsbury’s exits the digital entertainment business.

Both companies will ensure Sainsbury’s customers have a seamless transfer of the current digital libraries of books they’ve purchased, and will have the ability to continue buying eBooks from the millions of titles available on Kobo.com.

That’s a pity, but not entirely unexpected.

It’s not just that Kobo arranged similar deals with Tesco and Sony, but also that Sainsbury’s has only a negligible share of the UK ebook market.

There was a time when we thought Sainsbury’s might be a contender in the UK ebook market, but that was several years ago. the retailer first got into ebooks when it bought a controlling interest in the Anobii ebook community in 2012. That effort was rebranded as "eBooks by Sainsbury’s" in 2013, but in spite of several sales promotions in 2013 and 2014 its market share never amounted to much.

Amazon dominates the UK ebook market to an even greater degree than they do in the US. This is why everyone except for Kobo, Apple, and Google got out of the market.

So yes, today’s news was entirely expected.

image by Peter Glyn

Trends and shifts in a market/industry generally go through three stages.

In the first stage, the trend/change is noticed and discussed by insiders. In the second stage, the trend/change is reported by niche publications like this blog.

And then in the third phase, months to a year after the second, the mainstream media notices what is going and covers the story.

The disruption in the college bookstore market has just reached that third stage.

The NYTimes is just beginning to notice what’s going on with college bookstores. They still haven’t grasped the scale of the disruption, including the number of schools which have dumped their bookstores or found another use for the space, but the NYTimes has caught on to Amazon’s growing presence.

There was a story in yesterday’s NYTimes which looked at deals Amazon has struck with US colleges and universities. This includes the unstores Amazon has opened on and new campuses as well as less visible programs:

As school started at Stony Brook University this month, two freshmen, Juan Adames and John Taveras, set out to buy textbooks.

They had not heard yet that the bookstore was a books store no more.

This summer, Stony Brook, part of the State University of New York, announced a partnership with the online retailer Amazon, now the university’s official book retailer. Students can purchase texts through a Stony Brook-specific Amazon page and have them delivered to campus.

In the campus store where the textbooks used to be, there are now adult coloring books, racks of university-branded polos and windbreakers and three narrow bookshelves displaying assorted novels. The rest of the store is a vibrant collage of spirit wear and school supplies: backpacks and baseball caps; pompom hats and striped scarves; notebooks and correction fluid. There will soon be a Starbucks.

“I was a bit thrown off by the appearance,” Mr. Adames said.

It is a conversation occurring on campuses across the country: If more and more students are buying and renting their course books online, why do they need a bookstore?

The Queens College bookstore went digital in April, forgoing brick-and-mortar altogether, Adam L. Rockman, the vice president of student affairs, said. Students order their books online, then have them shipped to personal addresses or to campus, where they are held until students pick them up.

“There are certainly some growing pains in getting used to it for many students,” Dr. Rockman said. “I think the human condition is not to really love change.”

The thing about this piece is that the NYTimes missed half the story. They only talk about Amazon and ignore any other vendor.

For example, they mentioned Queens College bookstore but they don’t bother to discuss the startup running the QC bookstore.

That would be Akademos, a company which I had always associated with digital textbook solutions. It now offers a virtual bookstore platform and has signed deals with at least a half-dozen schools. (They had announced the deals in press releases, but no one was paying attention.)

Akademos offers a more limited solution that MBS Direct or eCampus, each of which want to replace a college bookstore completely while Akademos just wants to solve college students' most critical financial issue – textbooks.

It’s not clear which solution is going to come out on top, but it’s worth keeping all these details in mind the next time we read about B&N Education.

P.S. Also, when Chegg (another startup competing in this market) goes bankrupt, just think of all of these competitors and that bankruptcy will make a lot more sense.

image by Brad Clinesmith

For the past 18 months Bookeen has been working with SunPartner Technologies to develop its Wysips solar panel into a cover, and today that was released to market.

The Leaf Solar Cover is a 59-euro cover for the 8″ Cybook Ocean (as well as Carrefour’s rebranded 8’’ Nolimbook XL ereader). It features a solar panel developed by Sunpartner Technologies, and incorporates its Wysips solar panel tech.

Wysips is supposed to be a transparent material which can be used over a device’s screen, where it will act as a solar panel. That is how Bookeen had intended to use the tech when the deal was originally announced in 2015, but then they changed their mind earlier this year and switched to making a cover.

Bookeen changed plans because Wysips still cannot work as promised. Sunpartner has been working on this tech for six years and they have yet to produce a commercial design with a solar panel covering a device’s screen.

So instead Sunpartner has made a cover for the Cybook Ocean rather than putting a solar panel on the ereader’s screen.

The cover is available today on Bookeen’s website. Here’s an actual product photo:

Do you see the ghost-white panels on the cover?

That’s the solar panel.

That’s not very attractive, but according to the press release one hour of sunlight is enough to charge the ereader for 30 minutes of daily reading.

So there is a benefit, but is that enough to spend 59 euros on the cover?

Today I am officially unveiling a new page on my site.

News of the eBook World shows headlines and links from RSS feeds for six sites which cover ebook news. The list includes Publishers Weekly (just their ebook coverage), Teleread, DBW, Publishing Perspectives, and E-ink Info, as well as the Publisher’s Lunch Automat. (I would also include The Bookseller’s feed if they had a digital-only feed.)

I was inspired by a similar page on eBook Friendly, and wanted to give readers a single page where you can find all of the latest news from the important sites in this niche.

The page is a work in progress, so if you have any suggestions on other sites to add (or can tell me how to turn a Twitter timeline into an RSS feed), don’t hesitate to say something.

image by ryanjraffa

When B&N fired its CEO last month, we all knew that the first-quarter financial report would not be good.

And it isn’t.

Barnes & Noble report on Thursday that revenues for the first fiscal quarter totaled $914 million, down 6.6% from the same period last year. Retail sales fell 6.1% to $882 million for the quarter, while Nook revenues continued their downward spiral.

Nook revenues (including digital content and devices and accessories sales) declined 24.5% to $41 million for the first fiscal quarter. The division incurred an operating loss of $14.0 million, and its EBITDA losses were $7.9 million.

O O O

Here’s the press release:

Barnes & Noble today reported sales and earnings for its fiscal 2017 first quarter ended July 30, 2016.

Total sales for the first quarter were $913.9 million, declining 6.6% as compared to the prior year. Retail sales, which include Barnes & Noble stores and BN.com, declined 6.1% to $881.7 million for the quarter.  Comparable store sales declined 6.0% for the quarter, softer than the Company’s expectations, due in large part to lower traffic and the challenging retail environment.  NOOK sales, which include digital content, devices and accessories, declined 24.5% to $41.0 million for the quarter.

Retail incurred an operating loss of $7.4 million during the quarter, which includes severance charges and consulting fees of $7.9 million resulting from Retail’s cost reduction initiatives.  NOOK incurred an operating loss of $14.0 million, which includes severance and transitional costs of $7.2 million related to the previously announced outsourcing of certain NOOK services and the closure of its California and Taiwan offices.

The consolidated first quarter net loss from continuing operations was $14.4 million, or $0.20 per share, as compared to a loss from continuing operations of $7.8 million, or $0.27 per share, in the prior year.  Excluding the charges noted above, the consolidated first quarter net loss from continuing operations would have been $5.0 million, or $0.07 per share.

Retail generated EBITDA of $17.6 million, inclusive of the Retail charges noted above.  Excluding the charges, Retail EBITDA would have been $25.5 million, a decline of $19.8 million versus the prior year, primarily as a result of the sales decrease.

NOOK EBITDA losses were $7.9 million, which includes the NOOK charges noted above.  Excluding the charges, NOOK EBITDA losses would have been $0.7 million, improving $16.6 million as compared to a year ago, due primarily to the Company’s cost rationalization efforts.

On a consolidated basis, the Company generated first quarter EBITDA of $9.6 million.  Excluding the charges noted above, consolidated EBITDA would have been $24.7 million, or $3.2 million lower than the prior year.

Return of Capital
During the quarter, the Company returned $20.8 million in cash to its shareholders, including $11.1 million in dividends and $9.7 million through share repurchases.  The Company acquired approximately 830,000 shares at an average price of $11.73 during the quarter under its share repurchase program.

Outlook
The Company remains focused on executing its previously announced strategic initiatives to increase sales and reduce expenses.  Given the softer than expected sales results to date, and the expected continuation of the challenging retail environment, the Company now expects fiscal 2017 comparable store sales to decline in the low single digits.

Although the Company is reducing its comparable store sales expectations, through its expense reduction initiatives, it continues to expect full year consolidated EBITDA to be in a range of $200 million to $250 million.  Retail EBITDA is expected to be in a range of $240 million to $280 million, excluding the impact of any charges related to its cost reduction initiatives and costs associated with the recent CEO departure.  NOOK EBITDA losses are expected to decline to a range of $30 million to $40 million, including previously announced transitional costs.

image by THE Holy Hand Grenade!

Penguin Random House bought the vanity press Author Solutions (ASI) in 2012, they made sure everyone knew about it, but when Author Solutions was sold in January, PRH didn’t announce the deal publicly nor have they revealed the terms of the deal.

And now we know why.

Bowker released a report on Wednesday which covers the number of ISBNs sold in 2015 in the US to indie authors, ebook distributors like Smashwords, vanity presses like ASI, and ebook service companies like Blurb.

What the report claims is that it tracks the growth of indie publishing, but as we all know ISBNs are just is not a valid way to count the number of self-published titles released each year (but bless Bowker’s heart for trying).

Sidenote: An ISBN is effectively a serial number for a book. It defines the book so it can be tracked by industry analysts, but as many indie authors will tell you an ISBN is not required to publish an ebook. This is why many authors don’t get an ISBN for their ebooks.

So we can’t say anything today about self-publishing in general, but this report does offer a unique insight into Author Solutions. That vanity press includes an ISBN with each of the publishing packages it offers to the unsuspecting, and that gives us a clue how many authors are fleeced by ASI each year – or at the very least, it tells us the number of transactions.

There’s even a chart just for ASI and its multitude of publishing imprints. The chart is not complete (it’s missing Archway and a few other minor imprints) but what it tells us is that Author Solutions has been in decline for the past four years.

The chart is embedded above as an image, and can be found on page seven of the report (PDF). It shows that ASI’s business peaked in 2011, and declined ever since.

By the time PRH sold it in January 2016, Author Solutions was buying less than half as many ISBNs in a year as it did in 2011, the year before the acquisition. The ISBN count declined in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, falling 29% in 2015 alone.

The number of ISBN purchased fell every year even though PRH integrated Author Solutions into several of its subsidiaries around the word (Spain, India, BookCountry, and even a university) and convinced other companies like Barnes & Noble, Lulu, and Simon & Schuster to launch front companies for ASI to run.

In retrospect, the cause of the decline is fairly obvious; authors were smart enough to figure out that there were better options than being fleeced by Author Solutions. It’s not that hard to DIY, and there are also alternative to ASI which are run by ethical companies.

In conclusion, PRH set out to fleece authors, and were instead tricked into buying a pig in a poke. And to make matters even more deliciously ironic, it took PRH four years to figure out they had been had and to sell off Author Solutions for whatever they could get.

Today is a good day.

image by born1945

About two hours from now Apple will be holding a press event where they will announce the iPhone 7 – and possibly something we in digital publishing would be interested in.

While the new iPhone 7 has been so thoroughly leaked as to be considered fact rather than rumor, there have also been hints that Apple has a new addition to iBooks in the works.

Yesterday Brian Conway ferreted out a cache of Apple’s new trademarks. The tech giant is about to file dozens of trademarks, including for features for iPhone, iMessage, Mac, and one for something called iBooks Storytime.

No one knows what iBook Storytime is, and in fact there’s no way for us to know – the application hasn’t even been filed yet in the US (I checked). But there has been some speculation that it is a new feature which will be announced today.

My current favorite theory is that this is an iBooks Author app for the iPad Pro, but that is unlikely. "Storytime" suggests display rather than production, and anyway that iPad Pro app would most likely simply be called "iBooks Author".

While I decline to make guesses about iBooks Storytime (it could be any of a dozen features), I do think we should keep a watch for it today.

This might sound convoluted, but I am taking this report seriously because the application hasn’t officially been revealed to the public (it leaked). In my experience companies generally keep trademarks under wraps until after they announce a product or feature. This keeps everyone in the dark about what’s coming next.

So keep an eye out.

image by Valerie Everett

We’ve all read the claims from legacy publishers and their authors that ebook prices have to be kept high. The authors will justify prices by making tea in China comparisons or telling us that it just costs more for legacy publishers to publish a book, while publishers will tell us things like cheap ebook prices devalue IP (Markus Dohle, PRH, 2016).

I have generally doubted those claims, and today I came across a graphic reminder of just how bogus they are.

I was shopping in a local supermarket today when I found this bargain bin full of books:

Nestled in the frozen section (it wasn’t even placed with the magazines) was a pallet with a box full of discount books.

All of the books were hardbacks, and all were priced $5 to $6. This includes titles from most of the Big Five publishers like Macmillan and Penguin Random House:

Isn’t it funny how a reasonably priced ebook will devalue IP, and a remaindered print book doesn’t?

One would think that would be a logical contradiction, but apparently not under Whale Math.

For those just tuning in, "Whale Math" is the term outsiders have given to the bizarre business decisions of the Big Five publishers. Raising ebook prices to sell fewer print books is an example of Whale Math. Telling everyone that it’s good that revenues have dropped 10% is another.

Whale Math is basically the book publishing industry’s equivalent of Double Think from 1984, only without the media reinforcement. In that book the government devoted whole agencies to propagating the official view, but out here in the real world the only reinforcement of Whale Math comes from the book publishing industry’s echo chamber.

And thanks to the internet, which enables more voices to be heard; and the rise of indie publishing, giving authors more opportunities to bypass the gatekeepers; that echo chamber is not nearly as deafening as it was decades ago.

Just think, ten years ago I would never have been able to call bullshit on the official position of the book publishing industry, nor would authors be able to route around the major publishers and their self-destructive business decisions.

Just imagine where we will be in another ten years.

The Pew Research Center released a new report yesterday which showed that, for the third year running, the number of respondents who had read an ebook (or listened to an audiobook) remained flat while the number who had read a paper book wavered.

You can read the report on the Pew Research Center website, and you can read about it on a half-dozen sites. But I don’t know why you would bother; the headline data isn’t terribly useful – not in 2016, anyway(*).

The thing about this Pew survey is that it lacks specifics.

Pew asks a question which isn’t relevant in 2016. The print/digital divide mattered in the first few years after Amazon jump-started the ebook market in 2007, but in 2016 the market is a lot more complicated.

The question Pew should be asking is how readers consume the various genres and categories.

How are people reading their nonfiction?

Does it differ from their preferred format for novels?

What about comics vs digital comics?

The problem with Pew’s current report is that, for example, we now know that the romance and thriller genres have largely gone digital (and SF isn’t far behind). We also know that digital adoption in comics is occurring at a different rate than other types of ebooks, and there are also intimations that nonfiction readers are sticking with print.

You can’t find any of that nuance in Pew’s existing report, and it is the weaker for it.

And while we’re talking about reading preferences, let’s not forget that "ebook" is an incredibly elastic term in 2016. People are reading short stories, eSingles, websites, digital magazines, anthologies, articles saved in Pocket, and what have you, and yet Pew is only asking about ebooks.

If , for example, a given collection of stories is labeled a magazine issue rather than an anthology, it would not be reflected in the new report. Or if someone read an article in Instapaper rather than buying and reading it as an e-Single, that activity would not be tracked in the report.

And that makes little sense in 2016.

Don’t get me wrong; this report does have some useful data. Later sections confirm other reports that reading ebooks on tablets and smartphones is now more common than reading on ereaders.

The report also shows that 6% of the survey group read only ebooks, and that "7% of college graduates are digital-only book readers (compared with just 3% of those who have not graduated from high school), as are 8% of those with annual household incomes of $75,000 or more (compared with 3% of Americans with incomes of $30,000 or less)".

Those are useful data points, yes, but as I sit here looking at the survey results I am reminded that some in the book publishing industry, as well as pundits in the media, will use the stats to write off ebooks entirely.

"More people still read paper books that ebooks, so digital has failed to kill print" some uninformed reporter will write in the next few weeks. "Only 6% of consumers read only digital books, so it doesn’t matter that our ebook prices are so high" a Big Five CEO will proclaim.

Edit: Gizmodo has already proven me correct on my first prediction.

To be fair, it is not the fault of the Pew Research Center that this data will be misinterpreted. But we can’t have an informed discussion of the  state of reading until we have more data.

And we won’t have that data until researchers start asking better questions.

And that’s my takeaway on this report.

What’s yours?

image by smith

The independent bookstores of Chicago and the Chicago area have issued a statement in response to last week’s news that Amazon will open a brick-and-mortar bookstore on the north side of Chicago next year. The press release was posted by the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association and 16 area independent bookstores, all of which were named in the statement.

And yes, it is pompous. The press release includes statements from various booksellers and cites heavily from that questionable ABA report, but what really put the release over the top (other than the general tone) was this paragraph:

Whereas Amazon’s initial choice to sell books was largely for the purpose of collecting customer data, independent bookstores pride themselves on serving customers who read voraciously and eclectically and on using books to create a conversation with customers and their communities. Booksellers get to know their customers so that they are able to make personal recommendations that enrich and sometimes change people’s lives. In addition, independent bookstores collect—and have always collected—full sales taxes as required by law, thereby supporting schools, fire and police departments, and state and local governments generally. Amazon has also begun collecting and paying sales taxes, after being forced to by lawsuits and negative public opinion.

Does anyone know when all these upper east side literati decamped from Manhattan and moved to Chicago? Has any literature been written about that trek? (I’m out of sleeping pills, and am looking for alternatives.)

Honest to goodness, I haven’t read anything this pompous and self-centered since Authors United’s last salvo against Amazon – and that was over a year ago.

Remember Authors United?

AU was formed as a book publishing industry astroturfing group in 2014 during the Hachette-Amazon contract dispute. The last we heard from them was last August when they finally (after a nearly a year of blowing smoke) sent a letter to the DoJ, asking that Amazon be investigated for nonexistent antitrust violations.

Authors United has dropped off the radar after sending that letter, but now we have a new group which can pompously complain about Amazon.

Wait a second, what are the chances that we can get Authors United interested in protesting Amazon’s bookstores? Isn’t this right up there alley?

I think so, and I will do everything I can to get them involved.

P.S. It’s a shame Barnes & Noble didn’t sign off on this statement; that would have made it all the more ridiculous.

image by veritatem

 Yesterday I posted a review video of the Kobo Aura One, and after watching it for myself I realized that it didn’t adequately convey just how poorly the Aura One handled PDFs.

And so I made my own.

I tested my Aura One loaner with a 58MB Doctor Who comic. It’s not a large file, no, but I found that the Aura One handled a 6MB PDF and a 600MB PDF just as poorly.

The tl;dr version is that the storage limitations (8GB internal, and no card slot) won’t bother anyone because the Aura One is simply unusable for PDFs.

• When you watch the video, count the seconds it takes to open a PDF (8 seconds).
• Then count the seconds required to turn the page (4+ seconds).
• Also, late in the video note how it only partially loads a page (the footer is shown, but not the page image).

What’s not shown in the video (I couldn’t duplicate what I saw in an early test) is that the Aura One is even slower at redrawing a zoomed in page than it is at turning the page. If you picture the screen divided into a grid 12 panels, the Aura One was refreshing the page one panel at a time.

Do you want to know where Kobo screwed up?

It would be easy to blame the CPU, and RAM, but the real problem is the software.

Kobo choose a screen no other device maker could match, then gave the Aura One a one of a kind frontlight – and then crippled the ereader with the same awful software running on previous models.

As much as I love reading ebooks on Kobo hardware (the formatting options are to die for) I don’t use them for PDFs, and never have. The software is simply terrible, and that is true across the board.

Before publishing this post I confirmed that my Aura HD has similar poor performance in the PDF dept, thus depriving us of even the hope that the first official firmware for the Aura One could improve the situation.

And that is unfortunate for Aura One owners, because PDFs are one of the main use cases to justify the Aura One’s 300 PPI 7.8″ screen.